My fantasy lineups

I'm currently competing in three fantasy leagues: one baseball and two football.

1. Lenny Brazis Inner League, Inner League Baseball. I have been in this league since it was formed in 1988. It's the Championship Series, for which statistics for the majors' Division and Championship series are combined to determine who will go on to the Inner League World Series.

This league has two factors that differentiate it from most fantasy baseball leagues. 1) Scoring is by only one player in each of nine stat categories. Thus, it's possible for both my opponent and I to have the same player in different categories. In this case, I have Mark Teixeira for runs and my opponent has Tex for home runs.
2) There's a draft before each round to fill gaps in lineups caused by having players whose major league teams didn't qualify or no longer are in the playoffs.
So I trailed 16-11 in my head-to-head series after the Division Series ended. After that, I had to replace six players from the Twins, Reds and Rays whose teams lost in part because they perform well. I picked up a point to trail 15 1/2-11 1/2 after Friday's game because Hamilton's home run pulled me into a tie in that category, but stayed the same after Saturday's contests by falling behind in runs while I was taking the lead in batting average. My current lineup:
RBI-Guerrero
BA-Utley
R-Teixeira
HR-Hamilton
H-Young
SO-Halladay
SB-Victorino
W-Lee
S-Feliz

2. Andy Memorial Football League (charter member, since 1987). This is a scoring-only league. I'm in second place at 4-1 going in. This week for the first time I have players sitting because of byes. I think I used the same lineup of my first draft picks in each category for each of the first five weeks. In fact, I discovered that three of my four running backs have a bye this week, causing me to have to acquire a free agent. I didn't really take the time to investigate which RBs are owned in this 10-team league, but merely looked at the available freed agents in my deeper 10-team ESPN.com league. The free-agent RBs projected there to score the most points this week were John Kuhn and Earnest Graham, whom I requested in that order. My first choice, Kuhn, was available so I got him and waived Jonathan Stewart. My lineup:
QB-New York Giants (we get all of a team's quarterbacks, not just Eli Manning in my case)
RB-Chris Johnson and Kuhn
WR-Brandon Marshall and Roy Williams (replacing Larry Fitzgerald)
TE-Orlando Gates
K-New England (we get the team there too, and not an individual)
D/ST-Philadelphia

3. ESPN.com fantasy league. I'm 1-4 in this league, for which I got a crappy autodraft. Either I missed something or ESPN doesn't allow you to move players around in the draft order. I found I had to move any players I absolutely didn't want to the bottom of the list of a thousand or so players. I didn't have the time to figure out how to move the player I wanted 15 but ESPN ranked 30th ahead of a guy ESPN ranked 12th but I thought was more like 30th, so I pretty much took my chances with ESPN's order. That yielded two players I absolutely hadn't heard of on my opening-day roster. One of them, Aromasomething, had a pretty good first week so I played him the next week. I don't think the Bears have let him on the field since that first week. The other guy, whose name I don't even remember, hasn't been on my roster since the first week. But at least I could banish Brett Favre and T.O. to places from which they could never be autodrafted for me.
I this league, as I told you, I'm 1-4 but under what I believe are false pretenses. The league has two five-team divisions. Before the first week's games, my schedule said I had a bye so I didn't see any point in adjusting a crappy starting lineup to make it only slightly less crappy for a game I wasn't playing. In the second week, my team rallied for what the box score told me was a 1-point victory after Monday night.
This ESPN league has a feature called League Manager. As far as I can tell, that means whoever is the League Manager can pretty much do whatever he or she pleases. For example, changing the first week schedule after the second week's games have been played. For another example, losing the second week's game by 1 point but later adding in a 2-point "scoring adjustment" so you can win by 1. I have questioned first the necessiry of having a bye, and then taking away the bye and adding a "scoring adjustment," but haven't received an answer to either. In fact, there has been no response to any of my message board questions. I'm not really complaining about the bye-bye bye because I would have been killed that week in any event, even if I could have used my entire bench in addition to my starters.
Enough bitching about the screwed-up league structure. I've been patching together holes and making incremental improvements, in the manner of Lou Saban's 1963 Buffalo Bills. They were something like 0-5-1 and finished 7-6-1 and in a division playoff game with almost an entirely different team from opening day. That's a good story, maybe worth a book some day. So here's my lineup.
QB-Donovan McNabb -- I'd been following ESPN's projections for the most part, but have finally said, "Hell, I never wanted Matt Schaub on my autopicked team anyway" and benched him.
RB-Steven Jackson and Ryan Mathews
WR-Reggie Wayne and Roy Williams
RB/WR flex-My new main man, or at least 1st St. man, John Kuhn
TE-Tony Gonzalez
K-Matt Bryant
D/ST-Chicago
I think I have a chance to win again. The lineup of the guy I'm playing against includes two players on byes. I'd think he's waiting until the last minute to set his lineup if he hadn't played last week with three players on byes. This particular league sucks for more reasons than one. Of course, no one replied to my post about how many players with byes were "playing" in our league.